


Miriam's Daughter

by Hagar



Category: Jewish Scripture & Legend, Tanakh
Genre: Abusive Marriage, Contemporary Setting, Demons, Fasting, Female Friendship, Gen, Israel, Jewish Characters, Rosh Hashana, T’vila, Yom Kippur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-04
Updated: 2013-09-04
Packaged: 2017-12-25 00:29:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/946518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hagar/pseuds/Hagar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What to do when your husband is a King of Demons and it is recommended you do not divorce him, as told by one Noga Cohen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miriam's Daughter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IShouldBeWriting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IShouldBeWriting/gifts).



> Well, this was a lot of fun to write. Turned out longer than expected, too, and quite fitting for the season.
> 
> For those interested in other works featuring this Yael, see [Milk & Blood](http://archiveofourown.org/series/36438) and [Hamsa](http://archiveofourown.org/works/896704).
> 
> Beta by Sailor Sol and hh.

This year, like every year since I turned twelve, I fast on Yom HaKippurim. But this year, unlike any year before it, I fast with Intent.

I am… you know, that is a good question. My own name I know: my mother named me Noga. She’d meant to name me Carmel, she’d told me, after the mountain on which she grew up; or Ayala, graceful like a doe; but when she first saw me she thought of the nascent moon that greeted her on the way to the hospital - she told me - and so no name but the gentle glow of the moon would do. My family name - well.

Like I said: this year, I fast with Intent.

 

* * *

 

The first time I saw her I thought she was a stalker. No: the first time I saw her I thought nothing of it.

I work as an administrator at the university. The Humanities cafeteria is quite close, and they make a decent salad; we buy lunch there often and if not lunch, the coffee. It’s a very short walk, the Senate and Humanities buildings sharing a square. I go there almost every day.

When I first noticed her, I thought she was a regular, just like I was. I thought nothing of her beyond that: she couldn’t be less remarkable if she tried. Brown eyes, brown hair in a simple braid running half down her back, skin that tone that could be a dark Ashkenazi or a light Mizrachi, jeans or beige pants and a solid-colour plain blouse. She always made eye contact but then, that is not so unusual in Israel.

She was always there. Always there at the same time I was, in whichever line I was standing at, even when once I passed through before turning up at the office because Ranni had had a temper in the morning, and I did not have a chance to have coffee and was upset besides.

She’d been handed two paper cups and a paper bag and was turning  away from the queue just as I entered the courtyard where the coffee counter was. She handed me the paper bag and one of the cups before I could join the queue.

“Here,” she said. “Cinnamon, right?” and walked past.

The coffee was a tall cappuccino, extra strong with a regular amount of foam. I turned around, but the woman I now thought of as my stalker was already gone. The paper bag had two small cinnamon danishes. I saw the barista hand her the bag, but the cafeteria pastries never smelled that good. When I bit into one, it tasted as though it came from my grandmother’s kitchen.

 

* * *

 

The beach is Goa, some time at night. It’s an unknown hour at night and the year is 2001. Michali, Sharon and I were three faces out of the throng of Israelis looking to wash the military off of us inside and out with seawater and alcohol. There was another woman at the party, too old to be one of us kids, not dark enough to be one of the locals -

I woke up, blinked at Ranni’s back, and counted down from twenty to fall asleep.

Scouts summer camp of my junior year, we were tearing through the forest, hoping we won’t have to call the police, and a random hiker showed hand-in-hand with the twelve-years-old who’d disappeared with no good explanation of where she’d been -

I woke up, and it was a moment before it occurred to me to stretch to shake off the frozen nightmare paralysis.

The night of my Bat Mitzva, I wandered off from the party, following some sort of an intuition I would have denied if asked, and a woman from the event garden’s security found me and returned me, never saying a word to my parents -

A woman with brown hair and brown eyes, skin not too dark and not too light, with the sort of a face that told you nothing except she was from here, and yet, and yet -

“Noga?” Ranni muttered, stirring awake. “Who are you thinking of?”

“No-one, it’s just a dream,” I told him.

He opened his eyes to look at me. “You dreaming of someone else is supposed to make me feel better?”

“I’m not dreaming of anyone but you,” I told him and, in its way, it was true.

 

* * *

 

I hadn’t remembered any of that before: the beach, the kayetzet, the bat mitzva. And yet, I woke up convinced that those things had happened and that the same woman who’d known to buy me coffee and sweet comfort was the woman who stole the prettiest boy on the beach, the woman who found the girl in the night, the woman who smothered that call with a hand, was the same woman, somehow unaltered by the passage of time.

Maybe Ranni was right, and my imagination was more active than was healthy. Maybe Ranni was right and it was growing. Maybe.

I glanced at my email queue, determined that nothing was urgent and turned to the coffee corner instead, both grateful and frustrated that Chagit my office-mate did not smoke and Etti was late as ever.

Out on the porch, waiting for Shaul’s crap _botz_ to sink and become drinkable and still edgy over not having a smoke, I called Michali.

In between talking about her daughter and my husband and both of our idiot co-workers, I said: “I had funny dreams last night.”

“Funny how?”

“About people disappearing.”

“What, like that night you woke us all up at the eleventh grade kayetzet and Ye’ela’d gone missing?”

I blinked. “Ye'ela’s been missing for hours.”

“Ye-ah, but no one’d realized it until you woke up screaming. Must’ve been something in the water that day.”

“No, not like that,” I said. “I was dreaming about Goa.”

“Oooh, when they thought there might be a serial killer? Yeah, I dream about that too, sometimes. Usually when I dream that my boss is the serial killer. But Itzik is not going to just disappear, unlike whoever that was there.”

“At least Itzik is _probably_ not a demon.”

“Where’d you get that demon thing from, eh?”

“I don’t know, I think I need more coffee.”

“No, you don’t.”

I looked down at my still mostly-full mug, and found a way to finish the conversation. I looked at the phone. I could call my mom, but what for? I knew what she’ll say.

 

* * *

 

I avoided the cafeteria that day. After that, it was the weekend.

 

* * *

 

On Sunday I fell behind on my regular work because an idiot professor decided to argue with me about whether or not he needed to sign my office’s paperwork, and it wasn’t until three in the afternoon I realized I hadn’t eaten yet. I worked through my hours for the day and then went down to the Education building. The Humanities cafeteria wasn’t going to have anything edible that wasn’t a yogurt at this hour - if that - and for all that the afternoon coffee rush at Aroma wasn’t quite as bad as the lunch rush there, I’d still rather avoid it.

My stalker was sitting by the bar outside, drinking lemonade from a large clear plastic cup. There was a similar cup of whole apple juice and a large salad next to her elbow, both bearing the fancy salad bar’s logo.

I sat down at the same table and pulled the salad towards me; it was, unsurprisingly, my favorite combination. “How do you even know?” I demanded. “I haven’t eaten here in months.”

“I know because I need to.”

“How is my life any of your business?”

“Be’te’avon.”

I scowled at her around a mouthful of lentils, potatoes and vegetables. “And how come you don’t age, too?”

She seemed pleasantly surprised. “I was sure you didn’t remember. And, well, given that I do perceive the passage of time, I wouldn’t say it’s accurate to say that I don’t age. Don’t appear to age, perhaps.”

“So you’re both a stalker and a smartass.”

“I can see why you would think that.”

The salad tasted _fresh,_ tasted real in a way cafeteria food never did, even if it was the fancy organic one. The juice, I had no doubt, would taste this way as well. “ _What_ are you?”

“A woman. If longer-lived than the usual. And _you_ are a Tzadokit.”

“I’m a what?”

“Daughter of Tzadok, son of Aaron, on your father’s side. On your mother’s, you’re a daughter of Miriam. Two-thirds of the People’s most powerful priestly lineage come together in you.”

I stared at her. My father’s family name was Cohen, true, but… _You’re insane._ Except I’d seen her before, and she did not age. Except she knew where I’d be before I was there. She could be a crazy-talented stalker and myself just crazy, and yet -

I looked down at my salad. Then I looked up at her again. “What really happened?” I asked, challenging.

“The Goa beach was just an incubus. The girl at the summer camp, Lilith had been trying to reach, and others would take advantage of the chaos she caused. And when you were twelve - nu, like I said: you have potential.”

“Who _are_ you?”

“My name is Yael.”

 _Yael._ Such a common name. I would’ve never placed it if she hadn’t already mentioned Aaron and Miriam. “ _Yael?_ ” I demanded, wishing her name could be intoned two different ways the way Aaron did. **Aa** ron when it was just another man on the street bearing this name, and Aa **ron** when it was the Father of Priests. “Yael wife of -” but it didn’t seem right to refer to her as that, to define her as a man’s wife. I hated it when Ranni did that.

“I was,” she agreed quietly.

This was _insane._ But even if she’d somehow listened in to my conversation with Michali, I hadn’t mentioned the incident at my Bat Mitzva, I had never mentioned that to anyone -

I took a deep breath. “Why now?”

“You’ve been thinking about divorce.”

“Fuck you. If you’re going to tell me to not -” I slid off the chair.

She grabbed my wrist. “I’m not.”

After a moment, I pushed myself up and sat again. “I hadn’t told anyone.”

She smiled. “Angels are useful for that.”

“Ang- right.”

“Your husband’s true name is Ashmedai.”

“What the _hell?_ ” I only realized the irony of the idiom after I already said it.

“There are many things wrong with Ashmedai but his taste in women is not one of them.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not. Ashmedai is a high-order Jewish demon, with an intolerance for fish and a fine taste in women.”

“Hold on, wait a second.” I raised both my hand. “Ranni’s always had a temper problem and he turned _way_ possessive since we actually got married, but -”

“He’s Ashmedai, girl. That doesn’t make him the Adversary, not the way you’re used to thinking of that word. He’s nowhere near that powerful, and he’s really not that bad, as demons go.”

“I don’t suppose you could come with me to the Rabbinical Court and turn a staff into a snake or something and tell them my husband’s a demon, right?”

She snorted. “Ashmedai obeys the Word. You’d still need a _Get._ And that’s where the problem is.”

“I’m not following.”

Yael put her hand over mine. “Usually, Raphael can keep him from marrying the women he’s after. But you wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t hear him, and the idiot didn’t tell anyone until it was too late.”

“I can see _you_ just fine,” I pointed out.

Yael smiled faintly. “Your Great-Mother had had a few choice words about that.”

“I still don’t see what the problem is.”

“You’re a Cohenet, motek. If you divorce, your line will be nullified.”

“But I thought you said -”

She looked at me.

“That rule’s only for men! They can’t marry a divorced woman. But I’m a woman, there’s nothing...” _You are a daughter of Miriam,_ this clairvoyant ageless woman who may or may not be three thousand years old had told me. And Judaism was, ultimately, matrilineal.

I took another deep breath.

“Being a woman does not mean you are untouched by your family’s blessing or unbound by your family’s duties. There used to be Lore, among the women, but it was unwritten, passed from one to the other, and it was lost with these women’s lives. I don’t want for you to stay with him.” Yael’s hand on mine tightened, just a little bit. “We’d failed to stop you from marrying him, and none of us could reach you while you wanted him - and he’s quite good at being wanted. And now, we can still fix this.”

“I’m not even religious, I’m secular…” No, I wasn’t, not anymore, not if I didn’t walk away from her. But Ranni had a temper and couldn’t stand to be in a room that had fish and could be - _more_ \- when he wanted to and he kept telling me I had too much imagination, I was going to go crazy one day -

Was I going crazy? But I didn’t tell anyone about my Bat Mitzva. It was such a thin thread to hang on to -

“You are a daughter of Tzadok, son of Aaron, on your father’s side, and a daughter of Miriam on your mother’s. You are a first-born daughter born on the first day of the first moon of the year. You have a blessing in your blood, Noga. We’re going to fix this. Call it a belated birthday present.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Here’s what you need to do.”

 

* * *

 

It made perfect sense in the moment. By the time I got home I thought I must be crazy. The next day at work, in between closing the passing year’s budget items and making the new year’s available, I searched the internet. Not that it meant much - the woman I’d spoken to might’ve read the same sources and spun her stories from them; or I might’ve hallucinated the whole thing, though I tried to not think about that option.

But what I read did give me an idea.

On Erev Rosh HaShana, the eve of my birthday, I took a circle of carrot from on top one of the gefilte fish and surreptitiously dumped it in Ranni’s salad. He was allergic to fish, best I knew; he’d bolted and ran when my brother had grilled fish, once, and he’d refused to come back for hours. His eyes had been red and he was coughing and was visibly miserable; I never doubted his word before. But over the past week I read about allergies, too, and that made me doubt. People who suffered from allergies couldn’t safely eat foods which had so much as touched a plate which had touched the allergen, but Ranni had never been concerned about canned tuna or gefilte fish. It had only been the grilled fish and the smoke from burnt fish, I’d learned, was a deterrent to Ashmedai.

A little over a year before, I’d seen Ranni flee from the smoke of burnt fish. On Erev Rosh HaShana this year, I’d seen Ranni eat a slice of carrot that had fish all over it and come to no harm.

 

* * *

 

It’s ten days from Rosh HaShana to Yom Kippur, but only four of those are weekdays. I did not have much time. Luckily there wasn’t much I needed to do, and some of it could be accomplished online or by talking to Sheryll, the _ola_ in the office next door. There was one thing I had to do in person, though.

I sat in my car and looked at the door to the _mikve_ across the road. _Mikvaot_ were always such miserable-looking places. I’d had to go to a _mikve_ before Ranni and I could get a marriage license; it was as horrible an experience as it usually was, for secular women. I was a married woman, the attendants couldn’t kick me out, had to let me in, as a matter of fact, but…

I started the engine and drove away.

I had to drive further than I intended to find a suitable beach. Swimming season was officially over, but the weather was still good and Israelis are hardly known for abiding by the rules. There could be no barrier in _t’vila_ , and I needed a beach where I would not worry about being interrupted.

Well - not worry _too_ much. I still looked around as I undressed by the car - couldn’t risk sand getting into my clothes, couldn’t risk Ranni asking how it got there - and took off my sandals. I felt exposed, so horribly exposed - I’d bathed in the sea in my underpants and bra before, but this was different. This, I thought, was a much more serious test of Intent and belief than a four-walled _mikve_ with blue tiles like a swimming pool.

Lastly, I took off my jewelry: necklace first, then earrings and then my rings. My wedding ring came off last of all. I undid my ponytail, and walked down to the water.

As my feet touched the water, I remembered: _Her name begins and ends with water._ It was what the Sages had to say of Miriam. _You are a daughter of Miriam,_ Yael had said. Miriam whose name means loftiness and defiance and bitterness, whose name begins and ends with water, who’d watched her brother by the River Nile and danced by the Red Sea and watered the People from her well. Miriam who’d been struck with leprosy for speaking up against her brother, the same brother who’d then begged for God to forgive her; Miriam who was best loved by the People.

Meanwhile the water reached up to my armpits; wading had been difficult for a few moments. It was deep enough that, if I lifted my feet from the broken rocks at the bottom, I could immerse myself entirely. The air was still summer-hot, but my fingers were already turning blue.

 _Miriam,_ I thought, and immersed myself.

 

* * *

 

I didn’t want to go to an Orthodox synagogue, even if one could be found within walking range of my home. I didn’t want to sit out of sight, out of hearing range of the cantor, with small children running about in the small, enclosed space of the _ezrat nashim._ If I was going to actually go to a synagogue on Erev Yom Kippur - Yael had been vague on whether I needed to, but habits I did not know I had raised their heads - then I wanted to be able to see and hear.

That was where Sheryll came in. Like many _olim_ from English-speaking countries she was affiliated with a synagogue; Conservative, as it turned out - Reform communities were still a rare thing even among the Anglo _olim._ Her synagogue was too far for me, but she’d helped me find one that was within walking range.

When I left home, Ranni was flipping burgers on the pan. Oh, he’d always been derisive about my fasting, but he’d never been this bad before. Then again, I’d never gone to a synagogue on the Eve, before.

And all the way to the synagogue, I wondered. I managed to believe long enough to immerse myself, once, twice, thrice, but the fast would take longer than the immersion had, and I had to maintain Intent. Walking the silent streets among other people dressed in white, watching out for the last of the cars, I wasn’t sure I could do this.

This synagogue was small, just a converted apartment in an otherwise ordinary building. I looked around before stepping in through the building’s front door, and paused.

There was a man standing across the road. A man in appearance but not _just_ a man, perhaps not even a man at all and I knew, suddenly, that later I would dream of him and of others like him, of all the times I had willfully looked away from them.

It was an easy question, I realized suddenly. Did I forgive Ranni? No, of course I didn’t, because he hadn’t sought forgiveness. He was grilling a burger and smirking when I left home; he couldn’t be less sorry for his casual insults, for his possessiveness, his jealousy, his ridicule. Demon or human, he’d hurt me and did not mean to seek atonement.

I nodded at the angel across the street, and walked in to join the prayer.

 

* * *

 

By the time I returned home it was long dark. The front door to Ranni and my apartment was open, and Sveta from downstairs was in my kitchen. The area around the stove seemed freshly cleaned, and the grilling pan was sitting on the stove, filled to the brim with soap solution.

“Sveta? What happened?” I asked. I didn’t put my purse down.

“Noga, I’m so sorry - it happened maybe half an hour after you left -”

“What happened?” I repeated.

“Maybe you want to sit,” she said.

I sat. Sveta would only tell me to sit down if - “What happened to Ranni?”

“I heard something fall, something heavy,” she explained. “So I came to ask if everything was all right but Ranni didn’t open, and then something started smelling burnt, _really_ burnt, and he still didn’t answer, so I called MADA and they came with the police to open the door -”

“They took him to the hospital?” I asked. My voice was calm, too calm, and it wasn’t just the shock. I _knew._ Half an hour after I left would be about when I reached the synagogue. It was said that when someone died as Yom Kippur exited it was a sign of grace - that God took them while they were as pure as a human being could be. What did it mean, then, if God took someone just as the Holiday was entering?

It meant he knew no forgiveness was coming, and the person would be not inscribed and sealed for life in the coming year. That’s what Yael had told me, though in not so many words: _the Lord is bound by his Law no less than any one of us; the Law, that’s how one conquers a Jewish demon; and that’s what you’re going to do._

“Did they drive away with the sirens silent?” I asked.

Sveta stared at me. She, like anyone who’d seen an ambulance drive away from a scene, knew what it meant when the ambulance crew did not turn on the sirens.

“He ate fish on Rosh HaShana,” I explained. “He’s allergic. We thought he was fine, but maybe…”

Sveta nodded. “Yeah. Yeah - those allergies, you never know.”

I already told you: this year, I fast with Intent.

 


End file.
